I and many of my friends have used ChatGPT extremely effectively to diagnose medical issues. In fact, I would say that ChatGPT is better than most doctors because most doctors don't actually listen to you. ChatGPT took the time to ask me questions and based on my answers, narrowed down a particularly scary diagnosis and gave excellent instructions on how to get to a local hospital in a foreign country, what to ask for, and that I didn't have to worry very much because it sounded very typical for what I had. The level of reassurance that I was doing everything right actually made me feel less scared, because it was a pretty serious problem. Everything it told me was 100% correct and it guided me perfectly.
I was taking one high blood pressure medication but then noticed my blood sugar jumped. I did some research with ChatGPT and it found a paper that did indicate that it could raise blood sugar levels and gave me a recommendation for an alternative I asked my doctor about it and she said I was wrong, but I gently pushed her to switch and gave the recommended medication. She obliged, which is why I have kept her for almost 30 years now, and lo and behold, my blood sugar did drop.
Most people have a hard time pushing back against doctors and doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen. ChatGPT gives you the ability to keep asking questions without thinking you are bothering them.
I think ChatGPT is a great advance in terms of medical help in my opinion and I recommend it to everyone. Yes, it might make mistakes and I caution everyone to be careful and don't trust it 100%, but I say that about human doctors as well.
I agree that absolute deference to doctors is a mistake and that individuals should be encouraged to advocate for themselves (and doctors should be receptive to it) but I'm not so convinced in this specific case. Why do high blood sugar levels matter? Are there side effects associated with the alternative treatment? Has ChatGPT actually helped you in a meaningful way, or has the doctor's eventual relenting made you feel like progress has been made, even if that change is not meaningful?
In this context, I think of ChatGPT as a many-headed Redditor (after all, reddit is what ChatGPT is trained on) and think about the information as if it was a well upvoted comment on Reddit. If you had come across a thread on Reddit with the same information, would you have made the same push for a change?
There are quite a few subreddits for specific medical conditions that provide really good advice, and there are others where the users are losing their minds egging each other on in weird and whacky beliefs. Doctors are far from perfect, doctors are often wrong, but ChatGPT's sycophancy and a desperate patient's willingness to treat cancer with fruit feel like a bad mix. How do we avoid being egged on by ChatGPT into forcing doctors to provide bad care? That's not a rhetorical question, curious about your thoughts as an advocate for ChatGPT.
I know what you mean and I would certainly not want to blindly "trust" AI chatbots with any kind of medical plan. But they are very helpful at giving you some threads to pull on for researching. I do think they tend a little toward giving you potentially catastrophic, worst-case possibilities, but that's a known effect from when people were using Google and WebMD as well.
Are you asking why a side effect that is actually an entire health problem on its own, is a problem? Especially when there is a replacement that doesn’t cause it?
Side effects do not exist in isolation. High blood sugar is not a problem if it is solving a much bigger health issue, or is a lesser side effect than something more serious. If medication A causes high blood sugar but medication B has a chance of causing blood clots, medication A is an obvious choice. If a patient gets it in their head that their high blood sugar is a problem to solve, ChatGPT is going to reinforce that, whereas a doctor will have a much better understanding of the tradeoffs for that patient. The doctor version of the x/y problem.
I have type 2 diabetes. Blood sugar levels are a concern for me. I switched medications to one that was equally benign and got my blood sugar levels decreased along with my blood pressure. I don’t know why you assume that the medication I switched to might have higher or worse side effects. That wasn’t a choice I had to make given the options I was presented with.
Look, anyone can argue hypotheticals. But if one reads the comment being discussed, it can be deduced that your proposed hypotheses are not applicable, and that the doctor actually acknowledged the side effect and changed medications leading to relief. Now, if the new medication has a more serious side effect, the doctor (or ChatGPT) should mention and/or monitor for it, but the parent has not stated that is the case (yet). As such, we do not need to invent any scenarios.
The comment being discussed advocates for people to use ChatGPT and push their doctor to follow its recommendations. Even if we assume the OP is an average representation of people in their life, that means half of the people they are recommending ChatGPT to for medical advice are not going to be interrogating the information it provides.
A lazy doctor combined with a patient that lacks a clear understanding of how ChatGPT works and how to use it effectively could have disastrous results. A lazy doctor following the established advice for a condition by prescribing a medication that causes high blood sugar is orders of magnitude less dangerous than a lazy doctor who gives in to a crackpot medical plan that the patient has come up with using ChatGPT without the rigour described by the comment we are discussing.
Spend any amount of time around people with chronic health conditions (online or offline) and you'll realise just how much damage could be done by encouraging them to use ChatGPT. Not because they are idiots but because they are desperate.
As a physician, I can give further insight. The blood pressure medication the commenter is referring to is almost certainly a beta blocker. The effect on blood sugar levels is generally modest [1]. (It is rare to advise someone with diabetes to stop taking beta blockers, as opposed to say emphysema, where it is common)
They can be used for isolated, treatment of high blood pressure, but they are also used for dual treatment of blood pressure and various heart issues (heart failure, stable angina, arrhythmias). If you have heart failure, beta blockers can reduce your relative annual mortality risk by about 25%.
I would not trust an LLM to weigh the pros and cons appropriately knowing their syncophantic tendencies. I suspect they are going to be biased toward agreeing with whatever concerns the user initially expresses to them.
> How do we avoid being egged on by ChatGPT into forcing doctors to provide bad care?
I don’t ask it leading questions. I ask “These are my symptoms, give me some guidance.” Instead of “these are my symptoms, I think I have cancer. Could I be right?” If I don’t ask leading questions it keeps the response more pure.
Yeah, and "I found one paper that says X" is very weak evidence even if you're correctly interpreting X and the specific context in which the paper says it.
> doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen
This has unfortunately been my experience as well. My childhood PCP was great but every interaction I've had with the healthcare system since has been some variation of this. Reading blood work incorrectly, ignoring explanations of symptoms, misremembering medications you've been taking, prescribing inappropriate medications, etc. The worst part is that there are a lot of people that reflexively dismiss you as a contrarian asshole or, even worse, a member of a reviled political group that you have nothing to do with just because you dare to point out that The Person With A Degree In Medicine makes glaring objective mistakes.
Doctors aren't immune to doing a bad job. I don't think it's a secret that the system overworks them and causes many of them to treat patients like JIRA tickets - I'd just like to know what it would take for people to realize that saying such doesn't make you a crackpot.
As an aside I use Claude primarily for research when investigating medical issues, not to diagnose. It is equally likely to hallucinate or mischaracterize in the medical domain as it is others.
ChatGPT helped me understand a problem with my stomach that multiple doctors and numerous tests have not been able to shed any effective light on. Essentially I plugged in all of the data I could from my own observations of my issue over a 35 year period. It settled on these 3 possibilities: "Functional Dyspepsia with slow gastric accommodation, Mild delayed gastric emptying (even subclinical), Visceral hypersensitivity (your nerves fire pain signals when stretched)" and suggested a number of strategies to help with this. I implemented many of them and my stomach pain has been non-existent for months now... longer than I have ever been pain free.
I feel like the difference is that doctors took what I told them and only partially listened. They never took it especially seriously and just went straight to standard tests and treatments (scopes, biopsies and various stomach acid impacting medications). ChatGPT took some of what I said and actually considered it, discounting some things and digging into others (I said that bitter beer helped... doctor laughed at that, ChatGPT said that the alcohol probably did not help but that the bittering agent might and it was correct). ChatGPT got me somewhere better than where I was previously... something no doctor was able to do.
ChatGPT for health questions is the best use case I have found (Claude wins for code). Having a scratch pad where I can ask about any symptom I might feel, using project memory to cross reference things and having someone actually listen is very helpful. I asked about Crohn's disease since my grandfather suffered from it and I got a few tests I could do, stats on likelihood based on genetics, diet ideas to try and questions to ask the doctor. Much better than the current doc experience which is get the quickest review of my bloods, told to exercise and eat healthy and a see you in six months.
I don't know if I could trust AI for big things, but I had nagging wrist pain for like a year, any time I extended my wrist (like while doing a pushup). It wasn't excruciating but it certainly wasn't pleasant, and it stopped me from doing certain activities (like pushups)
I visited my GP, 2 wrist specialists, and physical therapist to help deal with it. I had multiple x rays and an MRI done. Steroid injection done. All without relief. My last wrist specialist even recommended I just learn to accept it and don't try to extend my wrist too much.
I decided to ask Gemini, and literally the first thing it suggested was maybe the way I was using the mouse was inflaming an extensor muscle, and it suggested changing my mouse and a stretch/massage.
And you know what, the next day I had no wrist pain for the first day in a year. And it's been that way for about 3 weeks now, so I'm pretty hopeful it isn't short term
I guess it’s not nothing that Gemini caught that, but that seems like a pretty obvious oversight from the healthcare practitioners - inquiring about RSI injuries should be one of the first things they ask about.
I pre-emptively switched to trackballs and to alternating left/right hands for mousing near the start of my professional career based on the reading I did after some mild wrist strain.
I think that 90% of what we get from doctors on musculoskeletal injuries that aren't visible on a simple X-ray is either oversight, or a bias towards doing nothing specifically because treatments have health, administrative, and financial costs and they might not help. There is no time authorized to do deep diagnostic work unless something is clearly killing you.
I’ve had good results with doctors for soft tissue injuries, but it doesn’t feel like something that GPs are generally equipped/motivated for. The good results I’ve had have been from doctors at high performance sports clinics, or with doctors I’ve been referred to by my (awesome) sports physiotherapist.
Yeah my dad would always go to sports medicine docs specifically because GPs are basically going to tell you to stop whatever hurts but sports medics will tell you how to do it without pain.
Do sports medicine docs operate within the context of medical insurance in the US? Or are they effectively doctors for the independently wealthy and corporate enterprises?
I had progressively worsening pelvic floor pain issues that AI helped me with and are now in remission/repair. My decade of interaction with multiple urologists and clinicians could be characterized as repeated and consistent "pretty obvious oversight from the healthcare practitioners".
I have a dear friend who suffers from this and she has also got nothing useful out of the many visits to doctors and specialists. If it's not too personal, could you share what helped?
Nothing personal, but without receipts I am going to take this story as made up propaganda.
I simply can't believe that visiting 4 health professionals, giving context about using a computer all day, nobody diagnosed a very common issue nor suggested it as a possibility.
I simply can't imagine this happening based on my experience with healthcare in two (European) countries.
I was having wrist pain from using the mouse, and switched to a trackball, issue solved, if the wrist doesn't move/flex, it doesn't get strained, therefore no pain.
The only thing that moves is my thumb, and it's much better for flexing than the wrist, also it has a tiny load to manage vs the wrist.
I’ve heard many people say the same (specifically about ppl being better than doctors because they listen) and I find it odd and wonder if this is a specific country thing?
I’ve been lucky enough to not need much beyond relative minor medical help but in the places I’ve lived always found that when I do see a GP they’re generally helpful.
There’s also something here about medical stuff making people feel vulnerable as a default so feeling heard can overcompensate the relationship? Not sure I’m articulating this last point well but it comes up so frequent (it listened, guided me through it step by step etc.) that I wonder if that has an effect. Feeling more in control than a doctor who has other patients and time constraint just say it’s x or do this
In America a side effect of our lack of universal care is that every physician has to carry their own malpractice insurance, whereas in most countries you can just get retreated if the first time doesn't work. The Dr might still face consequences is their was actual malpractice but there isn't the shakels of having to do it by the book so strictly.
You may have done so inadvertently. With the transition to doc-in-the-box urgent care with NPs with inconsistent training and massive caseloads... your provider is often using ChatGPT.
I caught one when i ask ChatGPT something, and then went to urgent case. I told my story, they left, came back and essentially read back exactly what ChatGPT told me.
No, no, no. You can change your doctor, and get one that listens to you - you can't change the fact that ChatGPT has no skin in the game - no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no fiscal/legal responsibility. Some people have had miracles with Facebook groups, or WebMD, but that doesn't change where the role of a doctor is or mean that you should be using those things for medical advice as opposed to something that allows you to have an informed conversation with a doctor.
Neither do most doctors. No gp will get disbarred for giving the wrong diagnosis on a first consult.
They have 15 minutes and you have very finite money.
Medical agents should be a pre consult tool that the patient talks to in the lobby while waiting for the doctor so the doctor doesn't waste an hour to hear the most important data point and the patient doesn't sit for an hour in the lobby doing nothing.
Doctors have no skin in the game too. Our society is built on the illusion of 'skin in the game' of professionals like doctors and lawyers (and to a lesser extent, engineers), but it's still an illusion.
Engineers to a _lesser_ extent? Maybe software engineers, but for every other engineer, theres very tangible results and they absolutely get sued when things go wrong, and the governing bodies strip engineers of their licenses for malpractice all the time.
Source: I used to be a geotechnical engineer and left it because of the ridiculous personal risk you take on for the salary you get.
In countries with public healthcare + doctor shortages (e.g. Canada), good luck even getting a family doctor, let alone having a request to switch you family doctor "when you already have one!" get taken seriously.
Everyone I know just goes to walk-in clinics / urgent-care centres. And neither of those options give doctors any "skin in the game." Or any opportunities for follow-up. Or any ongoing context for evaluating treatment outcomes of chronic conditions, with metrics measured across yearly checkups. Or the "treatment workflow state" required to ever prescribe anything that's not a first-line treatment for a disease. Or, for that matter, the willingness to believe you when you say that your throat infection is not in fact viral, because you've had symptoms continuously for four months already, and this was just the first time you had enough time and energy to wake up at 6AM so you could wait out in front of the clinic at 7:30AM before the "first-come-first-served" clinic fills up its entire patient queue for the day.
Because the republican party turned out to be a bunch of fascist fucks, there's no real critique of Obamacare. One of the big changes with the ACA is that it allowed medical networks to turn into regional cartels. Most regions have 2-3 medical networks, who are gobbled up all of the medical practices and closed many.
Most of the private general practices have been bought up, consolidated to giant practices, and doctors paid to quit and replaced by other providers at half the cost. Specialty practices are being swept up by PE.
Perhaps you are not aware, but Obamacare is actually Romneycare. It is set up exactly in the way Republicans wanted, instead of a single-payer system that the general public and especially the Democrats voters wanted. So why would Republicans critique the system that gave Insurance companies even more money?
> no reputation, no hippocratic oath, no fiscal/legal responsibility.
To say nothing of giving your personal health information over to a private company with no requirement to practice HIPAA, and just recently got subpoenaed for all chat records. Not to mention potential future government requests, NSA letters, during an administration that has a health secretary openly talking about rounding up mentally ill people and putting them in work camps.
Maybe LLMs have use here, but we absolutely should not be encouraging folks to plug information into public chatbots that they do not control and do not run locally.
If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful. They include: "Have curious conversation; don't cross-examine." and "Assume good faith."
HN is just a big internet watercooler type place where people exchange experiences, views, and whatnot. Such a context can't really work unless people assume good faith with each other.
I keep reading about these advancements in pancreatic cancer like early detection or possible treatments, but nothing ever seems to make it to daylight. Is there a reason why there's such disparity between this?
In the past decade, the five-year survival rate for pancreatic cancer has nearly doubled, from 7% to 13%. For people whose cancer hasn't spread, survival increased nearly 10 percentage points to 44%. So it's wrong to say that nothing ever seems to make it to daylight.
1. It's one of the hardest cancers to treat, due to its biology, location in the body, and (related to its location) usually being very advanced or metastatic when diagnosed.
2. Mice =/= humans, as noted.
However we're heading into a new era of treatments for some cancers including pancreatic. New agents targeting RAS/KRAS pathways will likely deliver the first meaningful treatment advances in decades.
Daraxonrasib (which was used in the linked study) is leading the charge, but there are multiple other drugs (including agents that are a little more targeted, and therefore likely slightly better tolerated, like pan-KRAS or KRAS G12D inhibitors) in development too.
Here are the three simultanious things targeted in this experment.
Triple inhibition strategy
Pancreatic cancer remains notoriously difficult to treat, with very poor survival rates and limited effective therapies. The new research aims to combat this by targeting RAF1, EGFR family receptors and STAT3 signalling – nodes that are crucial for tumour growth and survival.
Because research on real humans and real diseases is exceptionally difficult. Clinical research is notoriously expensive, results are likely to differ from non-human (preclinical) models, and trials take forever to get started, gather enough data, and get a drug actually reviewed and approved. So even when everyone is excited by the preclinical data, there are so many barriers (both scientific and non-scientific) that getting to an approved drug is pretty unlikely.
This sounds ethically questionable to me. I wouldn't rule it out entirely, but I'd want to see a well-reasoned argument, both technical and moral, that it was likely to lead to greatly reduced suffering for patients. Even then.... growing a body without a brain likely would not produce a model organism with predictive ability for human diseases.
I believe it could for a large number of tests. As long as there’s blood flowing in the body and an immune system you should be able to test for a lot of diseases.
As someone whose mother died to pancan, I could really care less on any of the brainwashed old farts in their churches or parliaments.
None of that matters to me or the people suffering from cancers, it’s al Knut a selfish obstruction attaching religion to the research material
A more practical option is using brain-dead humans for medical testing. This was discussed recently in the journal Science, using the term "physiologically maintained deceased". As they say, this "traverses complex ethical and moral terrain". (I've seen enough zombie movies to know how this ends up :-)
There are multiple examples in the literature of people leading perfectly ordinary lives whilst unknowingly having no more than 5% of the typical amount of brain matter (typically because of hydrocephalus). For example, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.7434023 from 1980.
The brain is indeed incredibly resilient - some kids with serious epilepsy get an entire hemisphere taken out - but which 5% you're left with matters enormously.
In addition to the reasons already mentioned (natural difficulties in translating results from animal models to humans), even attempting to achieve the same results in vitro and in animal models is complicated. They estimated that the reproducibility of these studies is approximately 50%. See Errington, T. M., Mathur, M., Soderberg, C. K., Denis, A., Perfito, N., Iorns, E., & Nosek, B. A. (2021). Investigating the replicability of preclinical cancer biology. elife, 10, e71601. https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.71601
Given the product splits, Model S and X served no further purpose besides taking up production capacity. If that unlocked capacity is used for more Model 3/Y builds or other product lines, then that would be a net positive for the company as opposed to continuing on with S/X for the sake of having product range.
I think of the i4 as being more of a Model 3 / BMW 3 series size car, isn't it?
The S is more in line with with 5er.
I love the way the Taycan CrossTurismo thing looks, but holy hell getting in and out of it is like getting in and out of a sports car. I expect it to be slightly compromised compared to the competition, not.. extremely compromised.
HHS is broader than CMMS. Someone who was formerly legal could now be illegal. But more prominently, Miller and Noem have focused on illegally deporting pending asylum cases to juice their numbers. Those folks may show up in HHS (and IRS) data.
I’m against using health data to benefit ICE but what you’re saying doesn’t make sense. There needs to be a critical mass of data for it to be useful to Palantir. If they are passing Medicare and Medicaid data, does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
It’s not. Palantir “receives peoples’ addresses from the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS)” [1]. That’s broader than Medicare or Medicaid.
If you’re on a legal visa and have to get a prescription filled, I think you’ll wind up in those data. (Same if you are legally on Medicare with a spouse who overstayed their visa.)
> does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
Not necessarily. As I said, these data are broader than CMMS. And the targets of the current ICE are not undocumented migrants. (I live in Wyoming, near the Idaho border. The farm workers are fine.)
I think it's pretty clear they are using Medicare and Medicaid data. They both fall under the umbrella of HHS so it would technically be correct to say they got data from HHS, but it seems like it's specifically Medicare and Medicaid data.
“Several federal laws authorise the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) to make certain information available to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS),”
> > does that mean that undocumented migrants are getting Medicare and Medicaid?
> Not necessarily.
Not necessarily, but probably. I was told explicitly that undocumented migrants weren't getting Medicare and Medicaid services, but at this point, I don't know who to believe.
If you go to an emergency room at a hospital which accepts Medicare (so, essentially all of them), you will be screened, and if in danger, medically stabilized (modulo difficult pregnancies in some states with anti-abortion laws, unfortunately).
I assume if you then fill paperwork out, they’d have your data - though I’m not sure why you’d agree to fill it out if you know you can’t pay, and that you’re just going to be discharged.
The UK's having a hard enough time trying to preserve freedom in the UK.
Hold up... So you're saying that they're actually not trying to preserve freedom in the UK and have arrested hundreds of people over twitter memes?!
In all seriousness, you're approximately as free in HK as you are in the UK. In HK, don't promote democracy or insult the government in Beijing. In the UK, don't suggest that diversity isn't Our Greatest Strength.
Every society these days has an untouchable third rail. None are without beams in their own eyes.
The discussion has devolved to such a point that people from outside the UK keep parroting this (likely Kremlin originated) line that the UK is now a Muslim stronghold with no free speech when in reality it just continues to uphold the values it has influenced the world with, one of the few positives from its dark past, of protecting those unable to protect themselves. Hate speech and punching down. As if inciting violence is completely harmless and no bad ever comes of it.
Many freedom-focused people without direct experience of disability, bullying or discrimination have no way to relate to that concept, and the echo chamber amplifies the intellectually dishonest takes until they take hold. Which is exactly what the angry, seething, downtrodden richest people in the world seem to want right now. I wonder why. What a sorry, hopeless state we've allowed to happen. Everyone is entitled to an opinion, sure, but the ones who've worked hardest to develop theirs should be weighted the most. Now a Russian bot has the same value on a platform as a nuclear scientist or, dare I say it, a real journalist. Because it's entertaining and tickles some dangling dopamine receptors. I'm sure people will wind their necks in when the ultimate result has finally played out and we'll cycle back to cooler heads prevailing, but I fear we'll have to go there first before we get back.
Yes I took the bait, but no regrets, I'll die on this hill. Hate bullies and liars with a passion.
The UK has turned into the worst parts of 1984. The politicians are absolutely stark raving mad at this point, what a horrible country to be living in.
10,000+ arrests a year for posting offensive tweets? The fact there is no freedom of speech in UK and the politicians will willfully arrest people for wrongthink is disgusting. It means that any rational person will keep their mouths shut for fear of getting arrested.
Private equity is even more insidious than you can imagine.
How it works is that PE will buy a profitable company, and then strip out everything it can, and then load on the debt. In exchange for loading on the debt, the banks will give preferential treatment to the other companies in the PE fund's portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
In addition, they will force the company to purchase services and even entire companies from the PE company's fund portfolio. <----- This is the part everyone misses.
Then, after a year or so, PE will IPO the company and sell to retail suckers. Mutual fund companies will hold their nose and buy into the IPO even though everyone knows it's a shitty company. The reason why is because the PE company will give early access to investment in their other more promising companies. <---------- This is the part everyone misses.
So PE companies will make a lot of money by stripping every part of the company out, maximizing and leveraging its portfolio of other companies so that banks and mutual fund companies will dump money into them. It's literally like harvesting a farm animal and carving absolutely everything of value off of it, as well as leveraging other companies to dump into it with the promise of access to other companies in its portfolio.
And then they turn around and dump the carcass into the hands of retail suckers, either through their mutual funds like Fidelity or straight onto the markets.
I worked at a crypto exchange and after I came to the conclusion that 99% of crypto was scams and rugpulls, I sold all my crypto and vowed to have nothing to do with it. It's more of a religion than a financial instrument and absolutely nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble, basically tulips with the religious promise of a better world. The number of employees that lost money on rugpulls while I was there, but "still believed in crypto" was staggering.
I've found that looking at some people's approach towards tech as a new religion helps me to understand their irrational/criticism-free opinions of them - also helps me understand that I'm not going to change their minds on any of it, and limits my desire to debate it with them.
The religion of the Social Graph/global connectivity, the religion of the Cryptocurrency, the religion of AI (and the separate religion of AGI). People's fixation on UBI leans religious too. All promised transformation into better lives for people around the world, but none have managed to achieve it. We'd really be better off shipping hundreds of containers of solar panels to the global south than pretending some quantity of code we write will have as big an impact.
I was fortunate to have had a religious crisis before I could code for shit. I was inoculated by that experience and got a booster shot during the DotCom boom. Problem is that not going in for fads gets you labeled as a curmudgeon, rather than as a reasonable person.
Given the choice between a 2000 acre banana plantation and 400 bitcoin. I would choose the banana plantation with full confidence that I would get a better return from bananas over the next 20 years.
This is the worst financial advice anyone could take.
For context, this is the equivalent of someone telling you to invest all your savings in the company you work for and use all your salary to buy more stock.
That makes sense, just treat it as a retirement account. And hope that it doesn't get cracked in our lifetime through quantum computing or alien technology.
Because of inflation, a normal savings account is a depreciating asset. It used to be different, but in the land of near zero prime interest, and phony inflation numbers, that's the way it sits.
Also, the risk isn't zero, just way closer to zero than that of Bitcoin or other crypto, in my opinion.
Through some coincidence I started with 80€, now it’s 20k. Maybe someday it’ll buy my kid a house. Then I’ll take it out. If I loose it all, I don’t care.
What risk are you taking on with a normal savings account?
If you are saying the global collapse of the financial system, crypto will be the first to fall in that case. Crypto like BTC is pretty much a more volatile market tracker.
Ofc a savings account has risk in real terms. But I assume GP was referring to risk in terms of losing principle in dollars.
There’s still some risk short of a global financial collapse where the FDIC rules are weakened, perhaps by making the $250k limit per individual for example, and then there being some bank failures. Or changing to only covering a certain % of deposits etc.
I believe there was an implication of the commenter I responded to that the risk of a savings account is somewhat similar to the risk of crypto. So, I asked said commenter to quantify or describe the risk. A comment simply with the text "A normal savings account does not have zero risk." is useless to a productive conversation.
ICE grabbed a US citizen friend of mine and threw her on a bus and drove her hundreds of miles away and was about to toss her over the wall to Mexico last week.
Civil asset forfeiture is another.
Tax warrants, which have zero burden of proof to be issued, are another.
I don’t keep money in banks, personally, after the third one bit me some years ago and I realized that storing money in banks makes it more likely to be stolen, not less.
That makes absolutely zero sense, and you know it. I understand you are here to essentially shill bitcoin given you have a company that exists because of it but at least argue in good faith.
> nothing has shown to me that crypto is anything more than a speculative gamble
Sounds like index futures. I understand wanting to buy fresh corn in one year at a constant price, so you get corn contracts for december 2016 and it gets delivered at that price when the contract expires. You know the cost beforehand and you plan for it.
Index futures? They just dump the equivalent dollar amount to your account when it expires. Who benefited? What happened? No physical commodity got exchanged. You've played with numbers, paid commissions, probably some spread and had around 6x leverage. Pretty much checks every box for gambling.
Both supporters and critics approach it too religiously. Yes 99% is scams and rugpulls. The rest of the higher profile coins are, at the very least, tools to make money. Why emotionally sell all your crypto vs holding some higher quality as insurance with potential upside? Or even, ride the periodic bulls and take profits, rinse and repeat? If it's full of scammers, why not take some of their money? Does this require "believing" in it? One can not believe in it at all, and thus actually insulate themselves from getting caught up in the hype.
That's also the essence of the stock market because you are getting paid in money, not in products/services produced by the company that you hold stock of
Gold has a use case in the real world. We can't manufacture it, so every time it is used to plate a printed circuit board, or XYZ other real application someone needs to purchase it from someone else. Some amount gets recycled, but certainly some not.
Crypto has zero fundamental use case in the real world.
Yes I know but... is that use case what really drives the price in the real world? I'm really asking. My intuition would say "no, the main driver is people trading it as a financial product", just like Bitcoin.
In the 1960s and 70s European countries became nervous about the US economy and sent dollars to NYC in exchange for gold.
The US even dispatched some high ranking officials to Europe to stem the tide. It predictably had the opposite effect.
So America had the option: stop printing money because gold reserves are finite or end the gold standard.
Yes, gold is very similar, but it has the benefit of being centuries old and not dependent on complex infrastructure.
Specifically, there is value in a global peer to peer and agreed upon standard of exchange of a guaranteed scarce resource that can't be double spent, such as gold and some cryptos.
Imagine a war, a natural catastrophe, societal collapse or upheaval.
You have to pack up, go elsewhere, or you're suddenly occupied.
Basically you have to ask yourself, what's more likely to be worth something in the future or elsewhere that I can park my money into until I need it?
Since Gold has such a history of being accepted by various cultures and people around the world, and it is very resilient, it doesn't require power, infra, computers, nodes, won't get easily destroyed to environmental incidents, can be stashed away for centuries without degrading, etc. It is arguably more likely to still be used as an exchange of value in the future.
Crypto, well, you have to be specific, let's say Bitcoin BTC, how likely is it that your wallet on your hard drive if you migrate from a war and find yourself in a new world order at the other end of the world, you can still use them to trade for goods/services and they're worth close too or more of what they were before?
It's hard to predict, but arguably it seems less resilient than Gold and therefore less likely for it to hold its value over time. That said, it may still appear better than USD, Euros, or shares in some company, etc.
That's why people say BTC is a "store of value", like gold. You use it to stow away value for when you need it later (even generations later), because it appears to be good at holding value even through geopolitical shifts, passage of time, and so on.
But, if people aren't actually using it for storing value, but instead for speculative bets, it means they are taking money out of it and not leaving it in, it becomes volatile, and volatility is a bad "store of value", because when you might need the value if it's at a "low" it's gone, and it failed at the use case.
If you go outside BTC, it becomes even less likely the other cryptos are good stores of value, and more and more they become speculative bets and a game of chicken.
And even BTC has high volatility and is used for speculative bets a lot. And gold isn't immune to his either.
There's no good answer here, nobody knows the future for sure, but that's the idea.
When people defend crypto as a store of value, now you know what they mean. They're basically hoping it'll hold value through borders, time, and so on.
no it really isnt. the value of crypto as it relates to FIAT is in trading volume over time, and it does not mean anyone needs to be a fool left holding the bag unless the trading volume decreases and doesnt return.
I want to buy something and use BTC as a medium for exchange. I take $10,000, buy BTC, send BTC to the seller, the seller takes the BTC and exchanges it for $10,000
However, we are not the only buyers and sellers and it takes time for the transfer to go through. So you have a variable amount of $ being held against the fixed amount of BTC, albeit with a variable amount available for purchase.
so i buy some BTC to make my trade, the amount of BTC decreases, the cost to buy more goes up. another person buys for the same reason. they spend more $ per BTC, but it doesnt matter - the value of what they are buying is the same so they buy less BTC. this happens for many people all concurrently.
the seller receives my BTC and then one of two things happens.. if trading volume has increased since i sent it to them then the BTC is more valuable and they make extra money. or if the trading volume has decreased since i sent it to them then the make a little bit less money.
there is a minor gaming of the system that happens with people trying to buy while trading volume is on the rise and then sell back while trading volume starts to decrease. this is why it looks like an MLM / scam - because this obviously doesnt scale, it isnt objectively valuable to increase competition for the resource while its needed to then try to release all that was purchased back into the trading pool while no one needs it. It is just a situation that is gameable in small doses if only a few actors do it.
People buying BTC for no reason other than to sell it back creates a gap in value on the other side for the sellers who need to sell the BTC they received in exchange for goods they valued at a specific $ value. The burden will be distributed across all the late sellers as trading volume decreases.
However, they dont need to sell the BTC if they would take a loss. They could just hold it until trading volume goes back up again, assuming trading volume is just fluctuating with standard customer behavior and not a change in belief of the stability of the currency.
Ultimately, the burden only really needs to be felt by those people who are buying the coin near its peaks who are trying to flip it and then missing their sell window. Actual vendors have wiggle room, as they only lose their COGS - even though they have their Revenue tied up in BTC, so they are still making profit if they sell, just a little bit less. the traders trying to game the system short term, however, are the ones who have more at risk as they have bought the BTC with after-tax liquid funds and need to sell it at enough of a higher price so that they make more profit after transaction fees as compared to alternative investments. As the price of BTC drops, they are the ones who are forced to sell at a minor loss and move the funds to other investments they believe are gaining value to avoid keeping the value tied up beyond their investment window waiting for the price to come back up.
The value proposition for holding BTC long term is basically a claim that the use of digital currency as an exchange of value will be so much more common in the future and BTC will be used for it, such that even times of "low trading volume" then will make current all time highs (in active trading volume) look tiny, even when accounting for the increase in tradable BTC that will come with all the BTC not currently in circulation do to people holding and waiting for that time to come.
So the traders rug pulling each other is kind of just a subplot going on with crypto and completely avoidable while still investing in crypto.
Trading it, obviously. Buying low, selling higher. Riding the repeated boom and bust cycles and getting in and out during some portion of the boom. What I'm saying is one can do this even if they have zero "belief" in crypto and know it's full of scams, scammers, and religious zealots.
It is basically a big game of hot potato. If you are OK with that, fine, but you are still just gambling on a party game chip.
There is a little bit of real value in having a rail that is hard to block, so you can move money across borders or around account freezes, sanctions, or runaway inflation. But that probably only justifies a tiny slice of the current price.
Most of the rest is speculation.
Fiat is different. A national currency is tied to the economy that uses it. Wages, rent, groceries, taxes, all live in that unit. Even if it crashes on FX markets you can still use it inside that country to buy local goods and services, and over time prices and wages shift along with it. The currency may fall against the dollar, but the local cost of living in that currency moves with it too.
The dream was that crypto gets adopted economically in a similar fashion, and even globally, that simply didn't happen, so it ended up just being gambling.
Why crypto? Why not one of the millions of other things you can invest in? Should I hold some onion futures as insurance with potential upside, or ride the periodic bulls of the Nepalese rupee and take profits?
Because of the returns, volatility and the liquidity obviously. This is a stupid question. I'm not even talking about "investing", it's a trading vehicle. Short term. Those other things you mentioned are less correlated directly to changes in global liquidity and overall risk assets, so in a sense even more risky and obscure. The fact that you even suggested "holding" onion futures means you're missing the point.
Looking at the chart of Nepalese rupee I don't see any bull market going back to 2005 so what are you talking about?
"Everything is the same" is a bad thesis. Just look at the charts.
Sure, not everything is the same. My question is, why crypto over all millions of other things you could invest in? Are you suggesting it's a better choice because of the volatility?
(The onion futures thing was a joke. Onion futures trading is specifically illegal in the US.)
Yes since you can extract a gain within some small portion of its bull market that's compressed into a shorter period of time relative to some other assets like gold. It means you aren't holding for as long.
Crypto rises harder and falls harder. For traders, this is very useful.
Of course I know you were just riffing, but the particular terrible nature of the assets you compared it to was worth pointing out. Since you did ask how they were any different.
Different asset classes have different uses. A thing that doesn't move around much for a long time is not so great to trade, maybe to invest. Crypto is a great sponge for liquidity.
Volatility might be useful but it also means you'll lose your shirt unless you have some secret technique others don't. If one can reliably ride the periodic bulls, take profits, and repeat, then they ought to be one of the wealthiest people on the planet by now.
I feel very different about AI. I have still no clear idea what crypto is good for except money laundering. AI feels very different. It might not live up to all it’s promises. But it is clearly very capable.
I've never understood crypto, however I'm long term Bitcoin fan and user, and don't consider it "crypto". I think Bitcoin is pretty much opposite what the typical crypto project is.
Monero is used for criminal activities, not Bitcoin. How do I know? I monitor crime, mostly but not exclusively drug crime, on Tor's hidden services: https://rnsaffn.com/zg4/ Monero is the cryptocurrency of choice.
The majority of the criminal activity on the Tor darknet is mediated by hidden services listed by that scanner. You can visit those services (using the .onion URLs) and see that Monero (XMR) is the preferred cryptocurrency. Bitcoin is sometimes used for hosting, etc., but Monero exists to avoid Bitcoin's security weaknesses and the criminals are well aware of this advantage.
This is the same, nonsensical argument against monero that is used against end-to-end encrypted messaging. "app of choice for criminals" "makes enforcement harder" etc.
It completely ignores the benefits of Monero. Crime exists. Its not going anywhere. It is not societies job to make the crime fighter's job a walk in the park. Crimninals use cars to commit crimes, we don't outlaw cars. They use masks, the store sells masks.
The benefits of a global, decentralized and truly private and free medium of value exchange would be massive to the average person, but deterimental to those in power so they must use FUD to squash it.
It's a store of value in the sense that it has a non-zero price at any given moment, but when people say that one of the functions of money is to be a store of value, they mean that its value must be reasonably stable so that its future usefulness is predictable.
> A store of value is an asset with as close to 0% volatility in price as possible.
You just proved his point. In this example, bitcoin's volatility is closer to zero than gold's. Thus, by the quoted definition of "store of value", then in this particular time frame (it would be very different going back 5, 10, 15 years), bitcoin is the better store of value.
And when it goes down the answer is to buy the dip. If you have funds needed for other things, they should be in lower-risk investments. As people get older, they should be moving large amounts of equities into bonds to lock in their gains.
There is a reason people still have things like checking and savings accounts and CDs.
I worked in crypto for five years, and this resonates. Sure, you can make money hustling some hype coin, but chances are you are more likely to lose money/time in the process. Outside of very specific supply chain blockchains, 99% of the actual value I see in order of value: 1) Stablecoins [faster than ACH!], 2) Bitcoin, and in certain places, 3) Ethereum has its uses.
Even Bitcoin though is not a panacea though, as without REAL transactional use-cases, it is also prone to sudden major drops. Until people in your home state can buy a car, house, and groceries using bitcoin directly (WITHOUT a Visa bridge), the real value will be highly subjective to the whims of the market.
How is it opposite. In my mind they all fall under the same libertarian fantasy umbrella.
The post mentioned the idea of casually sending a billion dollars. Was that ever possible with Bitcoin? AFAIK it's less ergonomic to send money using Bitcoin than it is using traditional banking.
Tell me a single useful real world use case that Ethereum is being used in today, a decade after its creation
If I can solve that problem with another simpler, older technology it doesn’t count as useful. I don’t care if you can pay for things using ethereum when I can just use my credit card instead.
I was taking one high blood pressure medication but then noticed my blood sugar jumped. I did some research with ChatGPT and it found a paper that did indicate that it could raise blood sugar levels and gave me a recommendation for an alternative I asked my doctor about it and she said I was wrong, but I gently pushed her to switch and gave the recommended medication. She obliged, which is why I have kept her for almost 30 years now, and lo and behold, my blood sugar did drop.
Most people have a hard time pushing back against doctors and doctors mostly work with blinders on and don't listen. ChatGPT gives you the ability to keep asking questions without thinking you are bothering them.
I think ChatGPT is a great advance in terms of medical help in my opinion and I recommend it to everyone. Yes, it might make mistakes and I caution everyone to be careful and don't trust it 100%, but I say that about human doctors as well.
reply